Craig Mayhew’s Blog

As soon as I switched to beThere and the appalling TG585v7 router they sent me I ran into VPN issues. Absolutly no outgoing VPN connections would work through this router. There is normally something called “VPN Pass Through” that needs enabling on routers to allow outgoing VPN connections. Unfortunately this router has no way of doing that through the web interface so I was forced to do use the following “solution”.

This will require you to have a spare DSL router as we will be turning the Thomson router into just a modem by using “bridging”. You will also need your static IP, subnet mask, gateway IP and DNS server IP addresses which Be should have sent you in your welcome email.

1. Plug your spare router into one of the ethernet ports on the back of the bebox.
2. Login to your bebox
3. Click “Thomson Gateway”
4. Click “Configuration”
5. Click “Setup”
6. Click “Next”
7. Select “Bridge”, Click “Next”
8. When asked, add your IP and DNS info.
9. Reboot router, it may do this automatically
10. Your “spare” router is now your actual router, plug the rest of your computers/network into it instead of the bebox.
11. Your VPN should now work.

If anyone else has a better solution than this, please drop something in the comments box below.

If it helps, the manual can be downloaded from here:
http://www.technostation.com/documents/26049/thomson-tg585v7

The most secure method of transfering files to and from your web server is via ssh. Here’s how to set it up and some of the pitfalls to avoid.

If you are using Putty generated key files they first need to be converted to openSSH before they can be used by NuSphere. If you are using Putty (Pageant) then instructions on how to do this can be found here. If not then please ignore that link and continue on…

1. Goto PHPED accounts, “keys” tab, create new SSH setting.
   
2. If you already have your keys then select no. Otherwise select yes and PHPED will auto generate a key pair for you. (Please note the server needs a copy of your public key)
   
3. Enable “Public key (ssh2)” auth method and add your OpenSSH key to “Public identity files” (Unless PHPED auto generated it for you, in which case it should already be there!).
   
4. Create new SFTP or SSH “accounts” on Account tab. In options set “SSH setting” to the one you have just created.
5. Enjoy your SSH uploads.

I recently needed to convert my Putty SSH files into OpenSSH so I could use them in NuSphere.

1. Open your private key in PuTTYGen
2. Export it in OpenSSH format. Top menu “Conversions”->”Export OpenSSH key”.
3. Save the new OpenSSH key when prompted.

For my and your reference, here’s a list of my firefox addons that I’m currently using :)

Am I missing any good ones?

Thunderbird 3 is awesome, I’ve only had one issue with it and that’s when it used up all the space on my primary drive. I thought it was odd but moved my thunderbird profile to it’s own drive. I realised the sent items just kept getting bigger literally as the minutes past. I opened my sent items to find it had duplicated every email about 25 times (and was still duplicating them) this gave me a sent items box that was fast approachiung 30GBs! I downloaded the thunderbird deduplication addon which is available here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/956. It removed the duplicate emails but even after running a compact my sent items didn’t change size on disk. In the end I renamed the sent item files “Sent” and “Sent.msf” to “sent.damaged” and “Sent.msf.damaged” and Thunderbird downloaded a fresh copy. Then once I was sure the emails hadn’t been wiped out, I deleted the broken files completely.

So far, I haven’t had a repeat of this issue and I do not know what caused it. At a guess my Sent Items were corrupted somehow.

The usual reason for not being able to update the scripts is that your permissions are wrong in your Firefox folder. Your Grease Monkey scripts will be in your firefox folder. The default place for this is (please substitute {username} for your actual Ubuntu user name):

cd /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts/

You need to make sure you are the owner of this folder. This command will make sure you are. Again please substitute whats inside the {} brackets.

chown -R {username}:{usergroup} /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

If that still fails to fix the problem, then you also need to make sure you have write permissions on your firefox settings folder.

chmod -R 755 /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

The seond life viewer has “File, Edit, View, World, Tools and Help.” along the top.

If you can’t see Advanced, press Ctrl, Alt and D together – that will bring up the Advanced option.

Click on Advanced. Click ‘Character’. From the next sub-menu, click on ‘Character Tests’. Finally, click on ‘Go Away/AFK When Idle’. Make sure this doesn;t have an X next to it.

After upgrading to Google Earth 5.1 I now get the following error when starting from command line. Error: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so).

It’s also worth noting that if I click the Google Earth icon it just sits there with no errors.

To fix this simply remove or rename libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 in the installation directory.

For some people this will be:

cd /opt/google-earth/

For others (me included) this will be:

cd ~/google-earth/

To rename the files:

sudo mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.orig
sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.orig

Now Google Earth should start without the error!

This article details how to download and compile the latest bleeding edge build of Firefox on Microsoft Windows 7. The firefox build will be full of bugs because it is bleeding edge, so don’t use this for anything important :) On the upside you will get to play with new features long before anyone that waits for “stable” versions to be released. Here we go:

Install MozillaBuild, a package of additional build tools. Make sure you install this with a directory path that does not contain any spaces (e.g. c:\mozilla-build\). If you get a message saying this application did not install properly then you should see a windows dialog giving you the option to re-install with the ‘correct settings’. After that all should be well.

If you don’t already have Visual C++ 2008 then download and install the express edition from http://www.microsoft.com/Express/vc/

Download the windows SDK if you don’t already have it installed (If unsure install it anyway) from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505&displayLang=en

We need to make sure that windows is using the SDK that we have just installed. Find “Windows SDK Configuration Tool” on your start menu, run it. Select “v7.0″ (or higher) in the drop down box and click “make current”.

Now we need to create your mozconfig file. This will contain various compile options for your custom build of firefox. Substituting {username} for your real username, you should find your mozconfig file here: C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\mozconfig

I recommend that unless you know what your doing or run into compile issues that are specific to your system then edit your mozconfig file to look like this:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"

#adding this to prevent it erroring about not being able to build for version 601000
mk_add_options MOZ_WINSDK_TARGETVER=600

#stop the atl errors
ac_add_options --disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options --disable-activex
ac_add_options --disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility

Hurrah, that’s all of the setup out of the way. Now we can try and compile firefox! Open a shell window by running: c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat. Even if you’re on 64-bit Windows, do not use the files ending in -x64.bat.

In the newly opened shell window type the following:
To get the latest source:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

To navigate to the mozilla-central directory:

cd mozilla-central

To start the build process:

make -f client.mk

Once compiled (It may take hours depending on your system) the firefox executable can be found in C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\objdir-ff-release\dist\bin

I recommend you create a shortcut to the executable and don’t open it directly. This way you can have it run from a different firefox profile and have it running at the same time as your standard firefox build while keeping the two completely seperate. This will prevent the addons etc from erroring about the unsupported firefox version. The short cut should be formatted as such: “Firefox.exe” -p “{PROFILE}” -no-remote (note: substitute the name of your profile for {PROFILE} or omit to launch the profile manger instead). I’ve set mine to “Firefox.exe” -p “nightly” -no-remote

If your still unable to compile firefox then please leave a comment, then try other resources such as https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_Firefox_build.

Unfortunately the IPv6 issue is still at large in Karmic Koala and will effect just about every internet application.

The problem is caused by Ubuntu requesting everything by IPv6 first even if there are no IPv6 Interfaces configured and timing out each time when it doesn’t get a response.

The workaround in firefox is to go to “about:config”, just type it into the address bar and hit enter. Then change the value network.dns.disableIPv6 to TRUE.

The bug can be tracked here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/417757